Compute Performance

I also added a new section of our video card test suite to test compute performance. With video cards playing a bigger and bigger role in computer performance in commercial applications like Photoshop and video editing it is important to see how well our video cards can handle it. To do this I use Folding @ Home’s benchmark. Our test is run with just the Explicit result and it is run using single and double precision. Typically single precision is what is used for gaming, double is for more commercial applications. To keep the playing field even all cards are tested using OpenCL because while Nvidia cards can be tested using CUDA, AMD cards can’t.

So how did the Titan X perform? Well I went ahead and ran the GTX 980 ad GTX 780 to get an idea of the progression. In the single precision benchmark we can really see the improvement going from generation to generation. The double precision test is a lot different though. Here we can see that Nvidia has pulled back on the Double Precision results on the consumer cards after the GTX 780. Their Quadro lineup is designed specifically for double precision performance so unlike the previous Titans the Titan X does not perform all that well on this benchmark.